Updated 12:15 pm, Tuesday, August 13, 2013

"With traffic only getting worse, an acceptable drive time to work is moving up the list of 'must-haves' for a new home," Kevin Foreman, general manager of GeoAnalytics, for INRIX, which provides the searcher feature, said in a news release.

People can type in the address of their destination, what time they want to arrive and how long they are willing to spend on the road, and then INRIX maps an area that will work. Windermere shows listings in that area based on price, bedrooms, bathrooms and other search parameters.

"We believe Windermere's new 'Search by INRIX Drive Time' is going to revolutionize how buyers search for homes online - especially in high-traffic, metropolitan areas," Windermere Real Estate President OB Jacobi said in the release. "We already know that commuting is a critical factor for 73 percent of buyers, and now they can filter their search results based upon drive time criteria, just as they do for price, number of bedrooms, and other important attributes."

INRIX said it calculates drive times by analyzing "billions of real-time data points from a unique combination of sources ranging from road sensors to real-time traffic speeds crowd-sourced from the company's own network of millions of vehicles and devices" and accounts for such factors as day of the week, season, holidays, weather, accidents and construction.

It works smoothly, although regular commuters from the East Side to Downtown Seattle might contest the idea that drivers could make the trip in 15 minutes, arriving at 9 a.m. (OK, just from the parts of the East Side closest to the bridges, but still).

Photo: Windermere Real Estate

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A sample Drive Time search, showing homes within 15 minutes of Seattle City Hall, with at least three bedrooms, listed for $500,000 to $600,000.

A sample Drive Time search, showing homes within 15 minutes of Seattle City Hall, with at least three bedrooms, listed for $500,000 to $600,000.